Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @07:35PM
from the now-to-bring-out-the-oil-dispersant-dispersants dept.

MTorrice writes "During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, clean up crews applied millions of liters of dispersants to break up the oil. At the time, the public and some scientists worried about the environmental effects of the chemicals, in particular how long they would last in the deep sea. According to a new Environmental Protection Agency study, the key active ingredient in the dispersants degrades very rapidly under conditions similar to those found at the Gulf surface during the spill. Meanwhile, in the much colder temperatures found in the deep sea, the breakdown is quite slow. The chemicals' persistence at deep-sea and Arctic temperatures suggests more research is needed on their toxicity, the researchers say."

They were screwed either way. If they hadn't used them, there'd be a congressional inquiry asking why we didn't bring all the technology we possibly could to bear on this horrible accident. There's always a line of people who are salivating to second-guess whatever decision gets made. I'm guessing there are a lot of pelicans who, if they could talk, would be praising the use of the dispersants.

On a long enough timescale, no matter how well funded, mistakes will occur.

Sure, but when the rewards are greater than the cost of the consequences of the mistakes, those mistakes become more frequent.

In fact, they become part of the business model.

I mean, who knew that allowing the banking industry to engage in limitless derivatives investing could possibly cause any problems to the economy? Who could have predicted that an earthquake and tsunami could kill the power to an old, poorly-maintained nuclear plant, causing the release of radiation? Why would anyone think that turning firearms into consumer products as readily available as cell phones might end up in a society with a lot of gun violence? What moron would think that injecting toxic chemicals into bedrock under high pressures near populated areas could possibly cause contamination of ground water, risks to air quality, the migration of gases and fracturing chemicals to the surface, surface contamination from spills and flowback or that those might cause health risks?

A $4.5 billion penalty is hardly a slap on the wrist. BP has set aside about $38 billion to settle up on the disaster in addition to the fines. There has never been an oil well worth that much money in history. It will certainly have an affect on the way they conduct their business in the future. Statistics do not bear out that ubiquitous gun ownership leads to dramatic increases in gun violence, in fact, quite the opposite is true. And while fracking is certainly not the panacea that many in the gas indust

Why would anyone think that turning firearms into consumer products as readily available as cell phones might end up in a society with a lot of gun violence?

I like how you tainted a punchbowl of otherwise completely reasonable and objective common sense observations by slipping in your little patently-dishonest pro-establishment turd; you sly devil, you!;)

Sure, but when the rewards are greater than the cost of the consequences of the mistakes, those mistakes become more frequent.

BP has already paid out tens of billions in fines and compensation. There are plenty more lawsuits in the pipeline, with a potential final payout of about $90 billion. That is an immense amount of money, far more than the GDP of most countries. You can be pretty sure that the oil companies are going to be a lot more careful in the future.

"A lot more careful" in the future? They certainly weren't much more careful than the Ixtoc spill 30 years ago, where a set of maneuvers eerily similar to those attempted to plug the BP spill were employed (and all failed similarly).
If BP didn't want lawsuits, it shouldn't have dumped millions of gallons of a neurotoxic carcinogen to cover its own liability (amount of oil spilled). Or maybe it shouldn't have put 10,000+ claimants' data on a single laptop only to magically "lose" it.
If corporations are p

Several waves of deregulation came about under the Bush administration. Drilling here in the US is more unbound than in europe, where features like a "dead man's switch" (google it) are actually required. The problem here was not regulation, it was pure malfeasance and a will to cover up the damage done no matter the cost.. the cost being the several hundred million dollar PR campaign BP ran afterwards to clean up its image.
The way you present this information makes it seem like BP and the obama administr

Really?! Oh I think you will change your tune if the price at the pump goes up by a few dollars. Well, maybe you won't since you might be a millionaire, but quite a few people will.

Face it, we WANT our oil as cheap as possible. Lower price of fuel means lower price of everything else. And lower price of living translates to more money available for spending on leisure activities.

If that means we need to exterminate all the cute seals to get cheaper energy, then so be it.

Huge myth. Gas prices have to do with the number of refineries and their processing rates rather than how much oil we are drilling. Your entire argument's nonsense. We could open ANWR and still not see a dip in pricing. Blame crony capitalism before supply and demand.

At the time of the spill, there were 3000+ rigs in the gulf. Only about 30 of those were deepwater. No, "natural seepage" will not cause millions of gallons of gas to drift out into the ocean every year, nor will "natural seeepage" destroy the oceanfloor habitat and leave a layer of toxic oil/dispersant sludge mixed with dead marine life several feet thick as this spill has done. Is someone paying you to post this?

No, "natural seepage" will not cause millions of gallons of gas to drift out into the ocean every year,

Natural seepage in the gulf of mexico is about 140,000 tonnes a year, or 1 million barrels of oil. So, yes it does. Ok, it's only a fifth of the amount from the deepwater spill, but it's constant rather than one-off. Link: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10388&page=70 [nap.edu]

At the time of the spill, the liability was limited to 75 million bucks. That's definitely one regulation which increases risk taking!

Given that both using and not using the chemicals has drawbacks and that it is difficult to make good decisions at a time of crisis, isn't it a good thing this study is done now? That way, when another spill happens, there is more knowledge to base decisions on.

..is to BP, which couldn't as easily hide the amount of oil spilled--the only thing by which it is liable. To anyone who actually lives around the area, the spraying of the neurotoxic carcinogen corexit is quite harmful.
"Isn't it a good thing this study is done now?"
You're waxing about how great it is we can assess what happened after the fact of a disaster, when BP couldn't even learn from the Ixtoc spill 30 years ago? That time, all the same techniques were employed with similar failures. When anothe

You and the mod who gave you Insightful need to read at least the bloody summary.

It's not a criticism of using it in the gulf. It's saying we probably can't use it in the deep sea, and crucially in the Arctic where we're still discussing whether we've got good enough kit to handle the inevitable spills.

But you can bet your sweet donkey you'll get your very own congressional inquiry if you're a shortstop linked to PEDs who hits too many homers. Congress critters only have so much time in session, so they have to focus on the really important issues.

How about a congressional inquiry into why BP continued spraying Corexit after the EPA told them to stop?
If there were pelicans who'd touched corexit (let alone the toxic mix that results from corexit and oil combined), they'd probably be dead right now, so spare me the bullshit.

When will we come to the place where we realize that the Earth doesn't need us to clean up from stuff that it already produces, in the places it produces it? Millions of gallons of crude seep from the Gulf floor every day. Nature/bacteria takes care of it.

Seeps are one thing. Blowouts are more than a tad faster. Nature takes a while and a big, concentrated, spill can cause a lot of havoc before nature gets around to clearing it.

Granted we need to avoid making it worse while trying to make it better. For

Water has its highest density at approximately 4 degrees C - just a tad above freezing. Water at higher OR lower temperatures rises above it, and water at that temperature sinks to the bottom.

Then it tends to sit there: Friction with the ocean bottom causes ocean currents to be very slow, so there's little mixing from turbulence. With all the water around it at the same temperature there's negligible mixing from convection. If

The use of dispersants (really, the term should be "submergants") just caused the oil to sink to the sea floor. This in no way mitigates the actual problem, and may in fact compound it over time. However, it did allow the EPA, the Obama administration, and BP to rehabilitate their severely tarnished images, because this was a problem that you couldn't see easily.

Gulf seafood is off the menu for millions of people now, and into the foreseeable future, because these "dispersants" just happen to be extremely toxic to humans.

Unfortunately, we appear to have learned nothing and will probably use this kind of sweeping under the rug tactic when future spills happen.

After all most of the life in aquatic environments is on or near the surface. The most important ecologies are the salt marshes and the top 200 meters or so of the ocean (epipelalogic zone) which is sunlit. It is where all the action is. 90% of life is found in this top layer. It is where the most complex and presumably vulnerable life forms are found.

So submerging the oil potentially reduces the harm that a spill may cause.

There are ships that can suck in the oil slicks and ocean water, dump 97% of the oil into the hold and pump the mostly clean water back into the sea, repeating the process as necessary.

However, the EPA demanded that in the Macondo spill they not return that 3% water back to the ocean, but instead made them send out tankers to be filled up with the 3% water, which were then transported back to shore for decon.

The obvious problem there was that the rate of processing of the sea water was limited by how fast those tankers could get out and back and unload, and what the onshore capacity was and what the onshore processing rate was. Being all finite quantities the rate was lowered tremendously from its potential.

So, using dispersants was the next-least-bad. I used to know their names, but one of them was much less toxic than the other two. Still, the oil separating ships operating at full capacity would have been much better for the environment, but the government was here to help.

You would not want to be exposed to vapors of any of the "dispersants" used during the gulf spill, let alone get them on your skin, mucous membranes, or for fuck's sake ingest them. Aconite is more poisonous than belladonna, but you don't want to eat either one. Same thing here.

The Obama administration's folly (other than being helpful to BP in almost every way, including having government officials spout their bogus numbers on a whim), disallowing regulations present in much of europe (see "dead man's switch") that were removed under the Bush administration, and not doing anything to punish BP after it disobeyed the EPA and continued to spray Corexit despite being told to stop.
Easy for you to say using millions of gallons of a neurotoxic carcinogen was the "next-least-bad" choi

A new study finds that adding Corexit 9500A to Macondo oil—as BP did in the course of trying to disperse its 2010 oilspill disaster—made the mixture 52 times more toxic than oil alone. The results are from toxicology tests in the lab and appear in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution.

Dispersants are basically soap -- the chemicals in Corexit and similar dispersants are the same as you'll find in bottles of Mr Muscle and other household cleansers living under the kitchen sink. They work by breaking bulk oil into small droplets which increases the effective surface area of the oil and gives the bacteria that normally degrade oil a better opportunity to do their job properly. They don't cause the oil to submerge, a neat trick if it could be achieved given that crude oil is a lot denser tha

Funny that BP's PR teams also tried to claim dispersant just soap--why is there incentive for you to repeat their nonsense?
In reality Corexit and oil make a muck that falls to the ocean floor--a layer of toxic muck and dead marine life several feet thick in some places. There is NOTHING to indicate Corexit allows bacteria to "do their job properly". If you're not being paid to write this garbage, you should be, I'm sure some of that several hundred mil BP spent on PR cleanup rather than actual cleanup aft